Rogue One

The movie is full of drop-your-popcorn chase scenes and cheer-inducing fight sequences, but there’s also a distinct darkness to Rogue One: It makes The Empire Strikes Back look like Return of the Jedi.

Read the full rev    iew on Vegas Seven...

Jupiter Ascending

Have you ever wondered what would happen if a pre-teen girl who was just coming out of her Disney Princess phase was forced to watch Flash Gordon, Brazil, Dune, Predator and a dash of Scientology mythos and then regurgitate them all into one mega-budget mess o' sci-fi nonsense?

Yeah, i haven't either but, if such a thing were to happen, the result would be Jupiter Ascending. Yet another film that proves that you can have plenty of money, talent and creativity and still produce absolute shit. Apparently due to some kind of studio shuffle, the Wachowskis made Jupiter Ascending with a big budget and little oversight--something that will not happen again, not after this. Well, and Cloud Atlas. And Speed Racer.

She does this falling and screaming thing at least a dozen times....

Here we have the perennially serviceable Mila Kunis as Jupiter, a young Russian immigrant cleaning lady who is actually the Queen of the Universe. No, fucking really.

This film is art-directed to the point of paralysis, but they gave someone 

with gold-leaf bathroom walls the kind of cheap white plastic toilet seat you get for $15 at Lowe's.

So, we open with our heroine's Cinderella drudgery, breaking into a Hallmark Channel romance-style flashback of her parents, punctuated by what might be mobsters or aliens or government agents or rival astronomers killing dad. (This, like many things in the film, is never quite explained.) Back to the present, it seems Jupiter's brother has talked her into donating her eggs for cash and giving him most of the money, because apparently cleaning other people's piss and/or shit isn't submissive and degrading enough. She bops on down to the clinic, but while she is unconscious, spread-eagled and having her ladyparts  probed (because helpless and because female), suddenly the doctors turn into weird aliens and announce that they're going to kill her.

Fortunately, Channing Tatum shows up on rocket skates to rescue her--a phrase that appears in the Jupiter Ascending script at least a dozen times. Yeah, there's some bullshit about how she is the genetic duplicate of some previous Queen of the House of Abraxas and, thus, owner of the Earth, but that's not really what this movie is about. What this movie is really about is Jupiter gets kidnapped by bad aliens in flashy outfits/falls through some really great computer animation/is rescued by Dogboy.
 

Yeah.  Charming Potato is a good-guy super-soldier space mercenary who's also part dog or wolf or something. Wait a second... half-man, half-dog in space? I know this one!

Anyway, we are treated to the first of many chase scenes. Jupiter Ascending is just over 2 hours--45 minutes of expository dialogue, 45 minutes of space-chase-fight scenes, 10 minutes of admiring Jupiter's costume changes, 10 minutes of CGI landscape beauty shots, 5 minutes of closeups of cool shit and 5 minutes of character development and plot.

Shitty hometown you don't want to go to, lame relatives you never see...

Our chief villain of the House of Abrasax is played by Eddie Redmayne in Cleopatra/Captain Hook drag, delivering all of his dialogue in a whisper that's supposed to be menacing but sounds more like his tonsils are sore from gobbling crystal meth and cock for 48 straight hours. It's perhaps the greatest post-Academy Award comedown since Halle Berry in Catwoman.

...consider this penance for stealing Michael Keaton's Oscar, you twee bastard.

He sends assorted creepy aliens and fabulously attired mercenary squads after Jupiter, thus adding to the legion of intricately designed and utterly unwritten characters that pass through Jupiter Ascending. It's like the filmmakers spent two weeks creating individual hairdos and tattoos for each one, but didn't even bother to give any of them a name.

Wait, Sean Bean? You're here too? Dang.

So after Dogboy stands around shirtless in a field of wildflowers for a good ten minutes--and you thought i was exaggerating the pre-teen Disney princess angle--Jupiter gets hauled off to the first of a number of space palaces, gets a new outfit and listens to some exposition from her "sister"--or is it "daughter," i dunno. We're basically just here for the pretty dresses and to watch this chick Bathory-bathe in the life force of humans and come out young. And get an ass shot.

Dogboy shows up and rescues Jupiter, she asks for a change of costume. (This is literally the only initiative we will seen taken or order we will seen given by the alleged Queen of the Universe.) Then we go into the terrible, obvious Brazil ripoff where we spend 10 minutes watching Jupiter and Dogboy follow some Space Twink around to various space bureaucracies to do the paperwork to establish her Earth rights. The tone is completely different than the rest of the film and it's painfully unfunny. But the worst part is this...

That's right. Terry Gilliam cameo. Terry Gilliam has to beg to get 1/100th of the budget wasted on derivative shitshows like Jupiter Ascending and is usually refused even that. But here he is, contributing to the stealing of his own schtick....

But, wait! Kidnapped again! This time she is whisked off to meet Prince Charming, who lays some crap on her about how he's a good guy and she can help him blah blah blah... it hasn't taken long for the space lords to figure out that it's pretty easy to handle the Queen of the Universe: Give her a pretty new dress, use a bunch of big words, light some candles and she'll agree to whatever you say.

Don't get me wrong. I am a full believer in the power of a good frock. But this is ridiculous. So, Prince Charming--who is actually evil--wants to marry the Queen of the Universe and Dogboy must stop the wedding... after we've had a good, long look at the gown, hair and makeup. Just like a hundred fairytales including Flash Gordon. I mean, it is such a direct Flash Gordon jack that someone should sue...

Dogboy takes Jupiter back home, only to find that the Cock Whisperer has kidnapped her (stereotypical) family, so she is immediately carried off again with Dogboy again in hot pursuit on rocket skates. Blah blah, sign over the rights the the Universe or I kill your family blah blah....

 You must pay the rent! 

I can't pay the rent! 

You must pay the rent! 

Seriously, i just want him to tie her to some train tracks already....

Dogboy to the rescue!

(Again.)

At the end, Jupiter doesn't want to be Queen of the Universe. No, she just wants to go back to Earth and scrub toilets and live with a family who doesn't appreciate her. This sort of "the only true happiness a woman can know is by having her entire identity wrapped up in her family" bullshit barely got by in the fifties: Now it's just ridiculous. Not even the endings of Mahogany and Made in Paris involved this level of abandonment of achievement for a life of domesticity.

Even more ridiculous when you compare it with a movie like Bound, where the women flipped everyone's script and came out on top. I dunno what happened with the Warchowskis, but Larry and Andy gave us The Matrix's Trinity, who was fierce and invincible and saved Keanu's punk ass countless times, as well as the aforementioned killer team of Corky and Violet.  Lana and Lilly give us Jupiter, who basically just changes outfits and waits for Dogboy to turn up and help her out of whatever mess she has wandered blindly into.They have every right to their own vision of femininity, i just wished they'd kept it a little more kickass...

This Island Earth

This Island Earth: It's got everything you come to schlocky 50's sci-fi movies for!

It may look goofy now but, in its time, This Island Earth was some high-end shit. It got good reviews, especially for the visuals and the script. The cast is headed up by Howard Hughes piece Faith Domergue (He picked her up when she was 15; at 17, she rammed Hughes' car while he was out with Ava Gardner.)

The rest of the cast is your standard bunch of B-movie yahoos. Our hero is the hilariously (but actually) named Rex Reason, who looks kind of like Paul Newman's ugly, slow younger brother. We've got some aliens with big foreheads and an assortment of scientist types. And, of course, the large-brained-yet-stupid alien in MC Hammer pants.

Ah, Universal International Pictures, the mark of quality. Of course, anything that is universal is also international, one would assume... So, anyway, Ugly Newman is supposedly a scientist-pilot-genius and babbles about science but i am distracted by his oddly small hands. He flies his plane, he loses control, it turns green and hums.

All the dialogue is like this -- random assemblages of early STEM jargon... Science science compounds science. Atoms science science science electricity. Science? Science. Plutonium. Science science.

Then, the bookcase he ordered from Ikea arrives, but instead the box contains parts for something else and instructions that are even more vague than what he expected to come with the Borgsjo.

Once assembled, it seems to make a really awesome television -- sorry, an interocitor. An interocitor is an alien television that can see you, talk to you and shoot lasers at you if so inclined. The TV is a gift from a spaceman named Exeter, who wants Tinyhands Newman to join his super-scientist super-squad.

And so he gets on a plane with no seatbelts and no pilot -- kind of like Spirit, but with more leg room. He falls asleep on the flight and wakes up to Faith Domergue driving a station wagon and wearing an oil slick of lipstick.

She takes him back to "the club," where he meets the other scientists recruited by the aliens. And Exeter explains why he has been summoned here and what it is the aliens want...

Holy shit, someone tell Tom Cotton he needs to write another letter!

But Jargonbarker Newman is suspicious. Although i don't see why he should be: A group of alien beings tricked him into building a magic television and then flew him in a magic pilot-less plane to a magic science camp where scientists from all over the world are living in an isolated mansion, working on a mysterious project. None of these developments bothered him until now...

Not to mention that Exeter and his buddy Brak (no, really) seem to have ways of convincing scientists to play along, aside from beautifully landscaped grounds and a generous meal plan. And is it just me, or do Exeter and Brak seem to be some kind of varietal of Oompa Loompa? Could it be that they need all of that nuclear power to protect themselves from the Vermicious Knids?

The aliens decide to return to their home planet, but first they have to blow up the mansion and all of the scientists in it... wait, isn't that what happens in The Rocky Horror Picture Show? So they're kind of Oompa Loompas and kind of Transsexual Transylvanians?

The three scientists who managed to dodge the sunlamp lobotomy attempt to escape by car, by foot and by plane, but only  Faith Domergue and Newman make it to getting sucked up by the high-pitched humming of a hubcap...

The aliens have decided to keep the pair, since they seemed pretty close to perpetrating whatever science was supposed to be perpetrated, although i'm still not sure why it is the superior alien race needs humans to solve their engineering problems...

And finally the film picks up and heads off to space! One thing i will say for This Island Earth is, while the scenes of the spaceships and planets are by no means convincing, they do look wonderful. Nice use of color, good drawings, slick aesthetics....

This is the aliens' home planet of Metaluna, which is under attack by the Zagons (which is apparently how you say "Vermicious Knid" in Oompa Loompese) who somehow can remote-control meteors and ceaselessly bombard the surface of the planet with them.

And here comes the monster! Well, actually, a mutant. Now, this isn't a Zagon, but some kind of lower life form that serves the Oompa Loompas. Anyway, planet under attack, Earthling scientists, genius aliens, powerful-but-dumb mutants, meteors exploding everywhere... can't help but end well, really.

Like The Angry Red Planet, This Island Earth earns punk rock points for being name-checked by the Misfits. And then of course there's the comic books, action figures, greeting cards, tattoos and T-shirts. It's also gotten the MST3K treatment -- it actually ranks as one of the less goofy films in the series. Sure, it's cheesy, but it's no The Viking Women and the Sea Serpent or Amazing Colossal Man and certainly no Brain That Wouldn't Die: This Island Earth is not that level of bad. Of course, how much you (or i) consider that good remains up for discussion...